Celebrating John F. Burns, War Reporter and Witness to Era-Defining Events

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John F. Burns interviewing Iraqis after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003.CreditMichael Kamber for The New York Times

By Susan Chira

March 27, 2015

For many Americans, the indelible image of John Burns is that unruly shock of gray curls, seemingly at odds with the stream of perfectly formed sentences illuminating the war in Iraq. His television appearances guaranteed he would be recognized by ordinary New Yorkers when he made his infrequent forays to headquarters — a place he spent most of his 40 years at The New York Times managing to avoid.

For his editors, though, John Burns was most himself when invisible — the full force of his talent and personality revealed in his matchless dispatches from around the world, and even more in his signature memos. These were peerless works of artistry, eloquence and guile — making a case for the front page, painting a scene of the reporting rigors he was undergoing, explaining why he could not and should not do something his editors had requested, apologizing for the invariable lateness of the elegant prose hurtling toward New York as deadlines came and went.

John cared about the right things, and cared about them deeply. He wanted to get the story, and tell it with the full force of history and moral conviction. Rules were secondary, and like most great reporters, he knew when to break them. Whether he was embarking on a 1,000-mile motorcycle trip through closed areas of China or in hiding from Iraqi government agents when American bombs were falling on Baghdad, John pushed boundaries in the service of truth.

Who can forget his portrait of the Sarajevo cellist who unfolded his plastic chair and played Albinoni’s Adagio in the rubble of the decimated capital? The Afghan couple awaiting their stoning death at the hands of the Taliban, and the woman’s weeping son checking to see if she was still alive after the first hail of stones? It was John’s eye and heart that would not allow his readers to forget the suffering of people so far away, so seemingly unconnected to them.

For 40 years at The Times, John Burns reported from bases in Johannesburg, Moscow, China, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and London — not to mention the countless other datelines he accumulated in the more than 3,000 stories he wrote. He witnessed some of the greatest events in our time — apartheid in South Africa, the increasing stagnation of Communism in the Soviet Union, the deliberate stoking of ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia, the tyranny of Taliban rule, Saddam Hussein’s brutality toward his own people and the ravages of America’s war in Iraq.

His readers saw the stories that resulted; his colleagues knew what it took to get them. John understood the foundations he had to build to do the work he yearned to do. During the Iraq war, he saw very early that this conflict was going to be the most dangerous he had ever encountered — the way the battle was fought in the heart of the city, and the way journalists had become not collateral damage but targets.

In 2004, John came back to New York laden with slides and statistics to make a case that The Times needed to spend what turned out to be millions of dollars to shore up the defenses of the Baghdad bureau and hire security experts to protect its correspondents. While some of his colleagues scoffed at the fortifications that resulted, John proved prescient, as the toll grew of kidnappings, beheadings and suicide bombings.

The paper was fortunate enough, too, to enlist the expertise of his wife, Jane Scott-Long, whose skills as a bureau manager were the principal reason that war bureaus in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were able to protect, feed and comfortably house the fleet of full-time war correspondents that the age of terrorism required.

John’s retirement is a day many of us never thought we’d see — he pulled so many all-night filing sessions, fueled by so many cups of tea, that Britain’s foremost heart hospital identified the tea as the cause of his heart arrhythmia. This is the man who, having spent perilous months at Memorial Sloan Kettering, returned to Sarajevo with the unshakable conviction that if cancer had not killed him, the ceaseless bombing of the besieged Bosnian capital would not either.

So I do not expect that this is the last we will hear from John Burns, even as he formally retires. I am awaiting the next memo, filled with emphatic capital letters, cascades of inserts successively labeled AAAA to ZZZZ, and the passion that burns through the printed word.

Susan Chira is a deputy executive editor of The Times in charge of the news report. She had previously been a Tokyo correspondent and the paper’s foreign editor.